Please view this blog as a work in a progress. See it as a passing glance through a partially opened window of my brain/mind, Forgive me, for the room you are glancing into is still cluttered and poorly organized, yet you will see some interesting things emerge from this superficial examination of the clutter. As I said, I have not yet fully explored and organized these ideas. I started this blog with a simple idea and became possessed by something newer and for more complex.

I started to write a simple blog asserting that I believe we have both a physical brain and a nonphysical mind and that both are equally important. I wanted to lash out at the flat-landers who would smash human experience into the single dimension of nerve cells firing as they rub up against each other and band into the environment. My argument was going to be simple: the brain is an important thing, but it is not the only thing.

The paradigm of the BRAIN-MIND is emerging to explain how the physical brain, connects with and is sensitive to the nonphysical actions of the mind. THE BRAIN is the physical structure that supports the nonphysical actions of the THE MIND. We, as human being, are sentient beings with a neuroplastic brain is capable of reprogramming itself based upon experience throughout the entire human life span.The ability to self-regulate the brain-mind assigns meaning to life experiences which can become culturally based beliefs that cause the development complex shared beliefs and personalities that influences our behavior, relationships, and social structures. This can lead to stress, conflict, violence, pain, trauma, stress-related illness, , addiction, and mental health problems. The Brain-Mind takes note and moves to correct the problems.

Medicines can certainly save lives and ease suffering, but so can our interactions with other people who care about us and have well-developed helping characteristics. The environment in which we live has a lot to do with health and illness. It is incredibly important in terms of alcoholism and drug abuse. Certain kinds of neighborhoods become the incubators of drugs dealers, crime, and violence. Where we live, who we live with, and the nature of our relationship with those we live with has a lot to do with getting addicted, getting clean and sober, staying clean and sober, or relapsing. All these things have a lot do with addition, mental health, and lifestyle-related chronic illness.

As I thought about it, the environment also has a lot to do with illness injury and accident. Some of the greatest improvement in public health did not come from medicine, that came from improved sanitation, safer cars, and the awareness of and elimination of toxic substances in our homes and workplaces. Medicine, of course, base a place in the treatment of heart disease, but so does nutritional science, stress management, and motivational counseling to keep people going with the big changes demanded of heart-healthy living. The lifestyle and stress-related illnesses are among the most difficulty to treating and the most relapse-prone..

Chronic Life-style-related IllnessIs the Most Difficult To TreatAnd the Most Relapse Prone.

In my opinion, the future direction for improving our ability to treat chronic addiction and other lifestyle-related illness will not come from a revolutionary new treatment for these lifestyle-related problems. I would celebrate if that were to happen, I just don’t believe that it will. The next big breakthrough that I see coming in the treatment of addiction and other lifestyle-related illness will not be revolutionary. It will be evolutionary and it is slowly unfolding before out eyes right now.

The Brain-Mind Cascade

There are evolutionary changes pushing us inevitably toward conquering addiction and other lifestyle-related diseases. The evolution involves examining everything we have ever done that helped out clients. It also involves bring all these success stories, no matter how small, together. We view each little success story as a piece in the puzzle to a complicated life-long chronic disease management process. Then we put them into a big pile (the big pile is actually a high power computer) and start looking for similarities and complimentary components. (The computer actually does most of the looking. We push a button and let the computer do the hard number crunching in the cyber-space world of correlations and algorithms.)

This will allow us to dramatically increase the amount of data that get analyzed and integrated our current knowledge-base of addictive, mental, and stress-related illness. This future direction that I believe holds the most promise. We integrate what we already know and look for new combinations and insights. We do this by organizing the mountain of data into a new grid. I believe that if we could pull off this comprehensive BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL synthesis of what we have already know, we will be able to find ways of matching patients to treatments and to prevention strategies that could reduce stress-related and life-style related illness by up to 75% in ten years. It is possible, but it would take a major effort. The necessary funding would require financial reorganization that would probably fail to gain any political traction.

We would need to bring together everything we have learned that helps people to recover across all areas of study. This would mean mapping out a … well a … Heck, there is no name for the type of map we would be creating. It would be as big a deal as mapping out the human genome, but at least the genome has a name. I can’t think of a good name for dynamic ever-growing map of the human condition so I will call it a comprehensive human bio-psycho-social-spiritual-cultural-ecnomic-political profile. (This name sounds simple and easy to remember, does it not?)

This task is as challenging, perhaps more challenging than mapping the human genome. It would involve getting dozens of different professionals, working in different areas of speciality expertise, who operate in different profession cultures, who use different specialty language, who compete for the same funds, and who usually dislike communicating across the professional and specialty lines because they don’t really respect what the other professionals are doing. We need to get several million of these professionals to become committed to a collaboration that could change on multiple levels the health of billions of people and the planet they live on.

This collaboration could change on multiple levels the health of billions of people and the planet they live on.

All specialties would be important. Collaboration and the willing to learn across disciplines would be the cultural organizing theme. Since each speciality tends to have it own unique professional jargon, it would mean creating a new common-sense language tha could be understood across disciplines and by the common folk who suffer from the illnesses being studied.. It would involve many cross-walks between different ways of thinking: people doing pure science would have t cross-walk their ideas with people doing clinical work.

The people suffering from the human condition, which is nearly every human being alive at some pint in his or her life, needs to be invited to participate. They would be invited to log onto smart social networking bulletin boards. These smart bulletin boards will allow people to tell the story of their disease and recovery, to describe their symptoms and related issues, and to report what they found helpful, not helpful, and harmful. There would be social networks linking people together to exchange information.

This would require big computer power — and we have that already. It needs to be designed for easy use by ordinary people who can easily enter their experiences with their disease or conditions. This probably means both key-board and voice-activated input — and we have those already. The computer will organize the information into a big number analysis. The most difficult part of the model is that a wide variety of social, cultural, spiritual, religious, and political factors which affect the health or illness generating capacity of the environment must be included.

The next big breakthrough in the treatment of

addiction and other lifestyle-related illness

will not be revolutionary. It will be evolutionary andits is slowly unfolding before our eyes right now.

It it were possible to build this comprehensive multidimensional map of human existence, interesting links and new approaches to cross-disciplinary treatment would begin to emerge. The technology s here right now. I am sure I am not the only on generating this idea or some variation, so the idea is coming of age. The financial resources are there, but would need to be redirected which would force a cultural change in values. So what s missing? The only missing element is an army of willing of professionals who are wiling ton take up the challenge. People don’t like change and most people don;t like to take risks. The fear of launching into a new comprehensive paradigm of total a comprehensive human bio-psycho-social-spiritual-cultural-ecnomic-political profile could open up a whole new environment paradigm and a new way of doing medicine.

This vision is emerging from studying the trends presented by Jeremy Rifkin in his books The end of Work, The Third Industrial Revolution, and the Zero Marginal Cost Society. tThe world is well into the information age that allows us to do things that seemed impossible just two decades ago.

It is interesting to see the emerging correlations between brain function and such diverse areas as behavior, stress, personality, addiction, violence, interpersonal communication, individual and collective problem solving, and mental health disorders. Looking at these relationships raise a very old question: does the physical brain or the non-physical mind determine our ability to control our behavior or does behavioral control result from the proper use of the non-physical mind?

There is another factor pushing the process in the information age. Health care is becoming patient driven as the internet provides readily available and scientifically valid descriptions of symptoms, illnesses, medications, and other treatment modalities. The mutual support groups starting with 12-Step programs are expanding through the internet to include high level patient collaboration and even patient initiated studies. Relatively inexpensive websites with smart bulletin boards organizes and sort information into categories to give a bigger picture that could have ever been seen before.

The answer, of course, is yes! At different times the survival responses of the brain (fight, flight, freeze) plus our deeply conditioned habits take over control and we do things we either are not aware of that, in spite of our awareness, we would prefer not to do. (Have you ever had your mouth take on a life of its own during an argument?). At other times we make conscious rational choices governed by the lifestyle we live and the people places and things we choose to associate with.

Today we are coming to the end of a failed paradigm that the physical brain is all that there is. All of the accomplishments and tragedies of mankind ia causes by a clump of cells that accidentally at some point became self-aware. Everything is pointing to a non-physical mind that inhabits and works with the physical brain to allow human beings to survive, thrive, maintain health, manage illness and keep moving forward with courage in to an uncertain future.